Will Flock Fly or Fly Away? What the Supreme Court's New Ruling Means for the Cameras Watching You.

Yes, you. They are watching you.

An automated license plate reader that appears to be a Flock Safety camera is shown on Northeast Fourth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. (Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel)

I. Are they Really Watching ME?

Let's start with a question you've probably never asked out loud and may not have even wondered while sitting at a red light --or, who are we kidding, waiting on a train to pass --in downtown Waycross:

Who exactly is watching me right now?

The answer may be more people than you'd like.

And on June 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court finally caught up to you.

The case is called Chatrie v. United States. It's a mouthful, it's a big deal, and it might just be the beginning of the end for one of the most quietly powerful surveillance tools in America. So grab your sweet tea. Let's talk about it.

II. First, a little backstory (with a robbery in it)

Back in 2019, somebody robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. The problem for police was a familiar one: they had no idea who did it. No good witness description. No usable surveillance footage. Just a crime and a whole lot of nothing.

So a detective got clever. Instead of chasing a suspect, he went fishing — and his fishing net was every cell phone that happened to be near the credit union around the time of the robbery. He asked Google to hand over the location data for every single device in a 150-meter circle. Not the robber's phone. Everyone's phone.

This little trick has a name: a geofence warrant. Picture the police drawing a digital circle on a map and saying, "Give us everybody who stepped inside this ring." Churchgoers at the building next door? In the circle. The guy walking his dog? In the circle. You, if you'd stopped for a deposit? In the circle.

Eventually the net snagged a man named Okello Chatrie, who was convicted of the robbery. But Chatrie raised his hand and said something every defense attorney in America has been waiting to hear a court take seriously: You searched a whole crowd of innocent people to find one guy. That's not a warrant — that's a dragnet.

III. What the Court actually decided

By a vote of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court agreed that when police pulled that location data, they conducted a search under the Fourth Amendment. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, put it plainly: an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.

Translation for the rest of us: your phone's whereabouts are your business, not the government's free-for-all. If the cops want them, they need to go get a real warrant — probable cause, a judge, the whole nine yards — not a fishing license that puts everyone in a net.

But here's the part that made me sit up straight in my chair.

The government tried a slick little argument. They said, "Sure, Google has this giant ocean of everybody's location data, but we only scooped out a tiny cup of it, just a narrow time window. No harm, no foul."

Cell phone showing many apps and information that is commonly used in Geofencing investigations by law enforcement.

And the Court said — and I'm paraphrasing here with great joy — nope. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, it doesn't matter how small a bite you took out of the database. A small sip from a poisoned well is still a drink from the well.

That reasoning is the real fireworks. And it's exactly why the folks who build and sell surveillance cameras got very quiet, very fast.

IV. So...Will Flock Fly or Fly Away?

Here's where it gets fun for those of us in South Georgia, where those little Flock cameras have been sprouting on light poles like kudzu. And yes, yes they are here. In Waycross. In Alma. In Folkston. In Douglas.

If you don't know Flock: these are automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). They photograph every car that rolls past, log the plate, the make, the model, the color — even the dent in your bumper and the sticker on your back glass — and turn it all into a searchable database. String enough of them together across a city and you've got a machine that can reconstruct where your car has been for weeks. Sound familiar? It should. It's the exact same "track everybody, all the time" logic the Court just frowned upon.

Flock Camera in Valdosta, Georgia.

Now, let's be honest and lawyerly for a second: Chatrie was a cell-phone case. It was not a Flock case. The Court didn't say one word about license plate cameras. Cameras watching public roads have their own line of older cases behind them, going all the way back to a 1983 decision about a beeper in a car, and the states defending Flock will lean on that history hard.

But. (You knew there was a but.)

There's a case already climbing through the courts — Schmidt v. City of Norfolk — where residents sued over a citywide Flock dragnet. The city won round one partly by arguing that its 21-day camera window wasn't enough surveillance to count. Sit with that for a second. Their winning argument was basically "we only tracked you a little."

That's the exact argument the Supreme Court just shot down in Chatrie. "We only took a small bite" no longer works. So the ground under Flock's biggest legal defense just got a whole lot shakier. Civil rights attorneys are calling it "wind in the sails." I'd call it a crack in the dam.

V. Why a criminal defense lawyer (well, me) is smiling about this

DeLeigh Poole and Logan Shubert, The Poole Law Group, LLC, at the Ware County Courthouse in Waycross, Georgia.

Because this is the whole ballgame, folks.

I've spent my career — first as a prosecutor, now on the defense side — watching technology sprint about a decade ahead of the Constitution. The tools got faster, cheaper, and more invasive, while the Fourth Amendment stood there in its 1791 outfit trying to keep up. Chatrie is the Court finally saying: the fact that a machine can do it doesn't mean the government gets to.

WE HAVE A FUNDAMNTAL RIGHT TO PRIVACY AGAINST GOVERNMENT INTRUSION. AND I WILL DEFEND THAT FOR THE REST OF MY CAREER.

That principle doesn't just protect the guilty. It protects you — the one who did nothing wrong but still ended up inside somebody's digital circle because you had the audacity to drive to work.

And that's kind of the whole point of what I do. At this firm we say it flat out: even if you did it, that doesn't mean you're guilty. Guilt is what the government proves, lawfully, playing by the rules — not what it scoops out of a database because scooping was easy.

VI. The bottom line

Is Flock flown? Will it fly or fly away? Not yet. But Chatrie just clipped its wings, and the next time somebody argues in a Georgia courtroom that mass surveillance is fine because it's only "a little bit" of your life — well, the Supreme Court handed us a brand-new answer to that.

Watch this space. The cameras are watching you. It's only fair. And I have two or three pending matters that just got more exciting.

This post is general commentary on a developing area of the law, not legal advice about your specific situation. If you're facing charges — or you're worried about how surveillance evidence is being used against you — call The Poole Law Group. We read the fine print so the government has to earn every inch.